Saturday, April 20, 2013

Luck or choice? Again, the age old question of circumstance or decision. Drawing a comparison to motivation versus talent might be helpful here.

Assessment.com wrote an article that stated: “Talent is what we DO well naturally. Motivation is what we LIKE to do naturally.” We can only go so far in life by simply utilizing our God-given talents. We will never be truly happy until we are doing what we like to do naturally.

We can say that luck is like talent. It’s out of our control. We either have it or we don’t. True enough. But then we also have to say that choice is like motivation. We create it. We are in control of it. We make it happen.

How do we make motivation happen? By our attitudes. By our perspectives. By learning more distinctions. By learning to do more of the things that we like to do naturally. We all have them, even if they are as simple as walking in the park.

Assessment.com also stated: “But then there are those talents that we really enjoy using. These are the motivated talents, and this is where the magic is.” Yes, we can combine our talents with our motivation to create a world we love. This is one technique of creating the career of our dreams! Think, what are my talents? What are my motivations? All sorts of personality tests are available to help us with these questions.

Why, then, do we find it so difficult to combine luck and choice? We see them as such polar opposites that we tend to be stuck in one place or the other. How do we combine luck and choice? Simple. Keep making choices. Luck will happen by itself, whether good or bad. Eventually, because of the law of statistics, we will have good luck. And, in the process of continually making choices, we have strengthened our muscles to make better choices as we move forward.

What happens to most of us is that we stop making choices because we feel so betrayed by luck. That’s creating our own destruction. Because, by stopping, we forget how to make good choices. We don’t exercise our ability to make good choices, and eventually only know how to make bad choices. Remember, luck will happen anyway. And, when good luck happens, do you want the know-how of making a good choice in that situation, or the frustration of the good luck being wasted because of a bad choice?

Orison Swett Marden, editor of Success Magazine says, “The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or in the help of others; it is in yourself alone.” By an unknown poet, “There is a choice you have to make, In everything you do. And you must always keep in mind, The choice you make, makes you.”